The Portable Veblen (29 page)

In high school, journalism brought her a certain swagger, her hands on the keyboard, where unexpected thoughts poured forth, a way to speak up and get to know herself. To think there was this wealth of activity locked up inside her made her feel hopeful and brave
. Hooray, I might be more than I seem
.

Remembering her muckraking portfolio put her in excellent spirits, and she began to jump from bed to bed, attempting flips. It was fun. The springs in the beds squeaked like lobster baskets, inviting the guests in the next room to imagine all sorts of things going on that weren’t going on at all.

“‘Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle / Looks just like a diamond ring
 . . .
’”
she sang. “Hey, you know
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
?” she asked him, midair. “When I was a kid—I thought the message was—that if you act like a pesty—little jerk—you lose your tail.”

The squirrel rose and stretched.

“No, but after a while—I began to look at it—differently. I realized it’s—this,” she huffed. “Nutkin was—a genius—a trickster—a philosopher—and probably a cad. But there he was—putting his life on the line every day. You consider him a hero, don’t you? You
know about the movement, don’t you? The followers of Nutkin—the Nutkinistas?” She laughed at herself, out of breath. “Old Brown the owl is
the man
.”

This was all part of the story of Wobb. There, squirrels had been enslaved in munitions factories in great caverns inside the mountains, but the movement was arming itself. The revolution would not be televised! She was smiling so hard she worried she might look wolfen.

“‘Tear down the waa-aalls! Tearr doown the waalls, motherrfuckerrs! Tear down the waaaaa-aaalls!’”
she sang, until someone began to pound the wall, like Paul used to pound at the squirrel. She came down on her knees with a resonant thud.

“Oops.” She laughed and took another gulp. She hadn’t gotten this drunk since high school.

“Let it be known why he taunts that owl. It’s necessary to taunt owls! They’ve been skinning squirrels alive for eons! So have hawks.

“The Nutkinistas believe the more they taunt, the more they break down the old paradigm.

“Which is like realizing you’re not going to take it forever when your family gives you hell.”

A beam of light crossed her face, a car parking in the lot. Guilt trimmed its hooves onto her lap, as she saw herself as complicit in a variety of crimes against childhood, especially her own.

“It’s all very perplexing,” she said, more soberly. She found her cell phone in the folds of the shiny bedspread, called Paul. But he didn’t answer, and she muttered good-nights into his proxy ear.

“But in Latin,” she said to the squirrel, because he still seemed to be listening, “
perplexed
means thoroughly involved. Entwined
and engaged. Totally the opposite of just being confused or out of it. It’s like people got too lazy to think being perplexable was a plus.

“Oh, well. It’s not so bad sleeping in hay,” she remarked, crawling between the sheets. She was growing drowsy, and found herself remembering the time she ran away from home to spend the expanse of a night in a horse barn. It was the same horse farm where she and her class had brought all the rotten apples from her desk, all those years ago. The sensations were indelible: the creaking beams, the sudden rush of air through the cracks, the snorts of the horses, and the rustling hay.

There she was, breathing the warm smell of horses and listening to them snort in the frosty air, and feeling like every heavy thing was off her back, a horse that had bucked its saddle. Kind of like tonight.

She felt an intimation of change. That until now she was a Christmas tree that had been decorated by someone who hated Christmas.

“Tell me more about what’s up in your world,” she said, sleepily. “Tell me more about everything.”

      15

I M
ELT
WITH
Y
OU

L
ittle did Veblen know that Paul, in a fit of jealousy so painful it shocked him, in realizing how little he knew about the woman he loved and wished to marry, convinced that she was spending the night with someone in a motel somewhere, some monster stubborn and bulky and impassable trying to take away the only thing that had ever mattered to him, who wanted to suffocate him, who wanted to break his bones and crack his neck and leave him for dead, was about to do something he’d never considered doing to any living being, let alone Veblen. He dumped Shalev back at the parking lot at the VA (after ranting about Hutmacher’s flagrant misuse of the Animal Rule, then enduring Shalev’s lurid reprisal of the pharmaceutical murder in
The Fugitive
and how Paul had better look out), and drove to Veblen’s house, where he commenced to ransack her drawers, cabinets, closets, even pulling all the boxes from under her bed, looking for any scrap of betrayal.

He was panting, sweating, his heart on the gallop. In the melee
he found old belts and ugly clothes stuffed in bags. He found old tangled telephones and a repulsive carving of turtles in a conga line. He found outdated samples of Paxil, Zoloft, and Prozac in the back of a drawer—what the hell? Was she on antidepressants? Why hadn’t she told him? In her underwear drawer he found a bar of soap he’d given her, and a pressed flower from the side of the road where they’d made love, wrapped in a small plastic sleeve.

In her bedside drawer were nail scissors, an inhaler, a pencil sharpener with a picture of an elephant on it, a pouch full of lavender, a stash of bookmarks from Kepler’s bookstore on El Camino, and a small brass bell.

Under the bed, in long flat boxes, he found folders with clips from the high school newspaper that Veblen had written. He found folders full of articles printed from the Web about Thorstein Veblen. He found folders stuffed full of random pictures clipped from old magazines—lots of animals, nature scenes, people with strange expressions on their faces. Everything he found made him love her more, but anger drove him to unearth something damning. He opened one notebook and saw “The Adventures of Hexi Pu, Chinese Girl Detective with a Shriveled Arm” typed on yellowed newsprint.

Hexi Pu liked to solve mysteries even though she had a shriveled arm. She thought that maybe the shriveled arm would attract attention, but it didn’t, so she was able to solve lots of crimes anyway. Sometimes having a shriveled arm allowed her to get sympathy and a way into people’s lives, better than if she had a normal arm. Also, being Chinese was a plus. People tended to think she was smart and shy, maybe a disciplined musician. They didn’t suspect she was a detective. Also it was hard to tell her age. She could still pass as a girl, even go into high schools under cover.

Hexi Pu liked asparagus and broccoli so much that she married an asparagus and broccoli farmer. His name was Dan. Dan also farmed other veggies but he increased production of asparagus and broccoli after marrying Hexi Pu. He liked her shriveled arm, it reminded him of a little kitten.

Paul shook his head and flipped through another notebook.

There is something that makes me feel like a wishbone.

Why did he want to marry a woman who wrote about shriveled arms and felt like a wishbone?

It was damp under the myrtle tree, and it was damp under Myrtle.

This made Paul strangely horny. She bewildered him. She put her energies into lost causes and scraps!

He pawed for love notes and confessions. He came upon manila envelopes stuffed with old correspondence from friends, from grandparents, and then, in a special folder, dozens of letters pressed in bundles tied with string. They had been written with a fountain
pen by some guy named Luke,
the
pompous ass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And were covered with sketches of machinery and buildings, as if little Lukey fancied himself a budding Leonardo.

I’m writing you from the Place Concorde, looking at the Eiffel Tower.

In Paris, one tends to be overwhelmed. The buildings are gorgeous and the boulevards wide and beautiful. Vienna was beautiful, but on a smaller scale. Vienna was only “whelming.”

What an
asshole
!!!!!!

He moved like there was cement in his joints, shoving the boxes back under the bed, closing the drawers, feeling like he’d raped her space and made himself all the more unworthy of her love.

A sampling of what’s on her bookshelves:
Don Quixote;
Leaves of Grass; Candide; The Vested Interests and the Common Man; Sult; Min kamp; Ut og stjæle hester;
The Horse and His Boy; Absentee Ownership; The Tale of Benjamin Bunny; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Achieving Our Country; The Story of George Washington Carver; Mrs. Dalloway; The Innocents at Cedro; Watership Down; U.S.A.; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; The Tale of Peter Rabbit; Our Master’s Voice; The Portable Veblen.

He paced around her cluttered little cottage, gasping for salvation. What had she been Googling lately? There was no stopping him, he was turning more despicable by the second. He flipped on her desktop. In her history he scrolled through
World Heritage Sites, France, Roman ruins, Orange.
This was good! This had to do with their honeymoon ideas, and he felt instantly cheered. Then
he saw
squirrels, cute squirrels,
great squirrel migrations
, and
sciurophobia
. Aha! She wanted to pin a phobia on him, pathologize him! Continuing down the history
: are college degrees really important, irritability, families of disabled, psychologists Palo Alto.
Goddamn it!

He’d resisted the impulse to analyze her gray matter, the way you never want to truly imagine eating human flesh or find the buttocks of a male friend sexy. You have the capacity to run any image through your mind, but some of them you pass up. Hypoxia set in, of the magnitude of the night terrors he’d experienced as a child, loathing infinity.

In the hallway he came face-to-face with the great Thorstein Veblen, Veblen’s god, the man she most admired, the grand inquisitor presiding over their lives. Who needed him? Who said he was welcome here?
Fuck you, asshole!
In what could only be called a hallucination, Paul suddenly felt a stout sense of presence, as if Thorstein Veblen were standing before him, confronting him over his bourgeois materialism, his peevish personality, and, most of all, his unsuitability for Veblen Amundsen-Hovda. Paul’s fist flew out and sent a spider web of cracks across the surface of the glass, and the picture fell off the wall. Droplets of blood rose on his knuckles.

Shit
. What was he doing? He had to blow this joint. He slammed the front door as if a good slam could help, and then he stomped angrily into Palo Alto as if an angry stomp could help. Now what? Now what! Cursing and nearly sobbing, he forgot where he was going and why, but then found himself slumped at a bar in a bistro, full of loud talk and the smells of olive oil and garlic, where he ordered himself a vodka straight up, and then another. He ordered some bruschetta from a gorgeous woman with
pale skin and a piercing on her nose, a heart-shaped face, and a jade pendant shaped like a lily pad against her chest, with her hair up and little tendrils hanging down around her neck, the skin on her chest the texture of a neonate’s. Other women would have him, wouldn’t they? A doctor? He could have someone new in a week. A day. Right now! Somebody smart and beautiful . . . someone who bored and annoyed him . . . selfish and vain . . . no. There was only one woman for him in the world.

He imagined telling his parents the wedding was off, and receiving their undivided scorn for the rest of his life.

He managed to crunch the bruschetta with some delicacy, so that the woman behind the bar wouldn’t think he was a pig, all the while wishing he were alone so that he could crunch it like a pig, and crumbs and grease could fly. The woman looked his way, and smiled a few times. He probably looked troubled, an invitation to anyone who noticed.

It had not been a foregone conclusion that he would come as far as he had. And yet to look at him you would not know his achievements gave him much pleasure.

•   •   •

H
ONORS BIOLOGY,
tenth grade. Sixteen years old, testicles hot and itching, pimples pressing up on his chest. Fascinated by the paradox of the digestive system, he wrote his first scientific inquiry, “Why the Stomach Doesn’t Digest Itself,” in the fall, and his teacher, old Mr. Gielow, with his funny two-tone glasses and his leprechaun-shaped head, told him it was the best damned student work he’d seen in all his years at South Humboldt High. He told Paul, who had been struggling to find his niche academically,
that he was a natural scientist, and asked him what he planned to do for the science fair, where he could make a big splash.

“I’m thinking of assembling a bunch of snails to prove that they make sounds when under duress,” Paul said.

Gielow frowned. “Now, is this in contention? I don’t know much about this.”

“I don’t either,” Paul said. “I really want to find out.”

“What kind of duress?” Gielow wanted to know. “We need to follow the guidelines of the Animal Welfare Act.”

“Invertebrates aren’t covered by the Animal Welfare Act,” Paul said. “Anyway, it’s not like I’m going to feed them Sluggo. I’m putting them in a crowded bucket.”

“All right. And then?”

“So the project will be to observe and record them until I get my results.”

Because Gielow had never tried to cut him down or discourage him in any way, Paul told him the story behind it all, from when he was ten years old, peeling snails from the stumps and rocks in the garden, from the broadsides of kohlrabi leaves and rhubarb, across which they’d strewn their silvery trails. It was one of his chores to fill a pail with them and take them to the hen house. This one morning he had counted seventy-two, sliming and squirming, eyes extended on thick rubbery stems—and it had been faint at first, rising to a shrill pitch. He came charging with his bucket back to the house.